Looking back over the last few years of building the web, a full fashion cycle has come and gone. Trends that felt mandatory in 2022 now read as instantly dated, and a few unglamorous fundamentals quietly won. Here is our honest scorecard.
The preloader curtain
For a while, every ambitious site opened with a curtain: a percentage counter, a logo animation, a swipe of black before you were allowed in. It signaled craft in a portfolio-site way, and it made every visit slower on purpose.
It died because it deserved to. A loading screen on a page that could have simply loaded is theater at the visitor's expense. We delete preloaders on sight in our own work; a site that paints in under a second is a better flex than any curtain.
Scroll-jacking
Scroll-jacking took the one interaction everyone owns, the scroll, and repossessed it. Pages hijacked your input to play a story at their own pace: three swipes to move one section, animations you could not skip, momentum that belonged to the site instead of you.
A few cinematic product pages made it work with enormous budgets. Everyone else shipped frustration. The pattern faded as teams noticed what their analytics had said all along: people leave pages that fight them. Native scroll won because it was never the site's to take.
Glassmorphism on everything
After frosted panels arrived in the big operating systems, translucent blur washed over the web. Cards, navs, modals, entire layouts rendered as fogged glass, often with text contrast that quietly failed anyone with imperfect vision.
The look did not die entirely, and it should not. Used sparingly, a frosted layer gives depth without opacity: a nav bar that blurs on scroll, a translucent card sitting on a dark band. Used everywhere, it is a screenshot aesthetic, gorgeous in a static mockup and illegible over a busy photo. We still ship glass, but as seasoning, never the meal.
Cursor theater
Custom cursors, trailing dots, magnetic buttons that grabbed your pointer from forty pixels away. The cursor became a mascot. On the sites where it worked, it was one restrained dot on one page. Everywhere else it was latency dressed as delight, and it meant nothing to the majority of visitors browsing on a phone, who never saw it at all.
Honorable mentions
A few smaller fashions came and went in the same window. Oversized brutalist type cooled from a movement into an occasional accent. Autoplaying background video lost to bandwidth reality and to the click-to-play facade. And the hero carousel, already wounded in 2022, finally finished dying: nobody ever clicked slide three.
The AI-gradient era
Then the generative-AI boom arrived, and with it the most uniform visual trend we have ever watched spread: blue-to-violet gradients, sparkle icons, glowing purple orbs on near-black. Within about a year it stopped saying innovative and started saying template. The gradient became the tell.
The deeper problem was sameness at scale. When thousands of landing pages adopt the same gradient, the same sparkle, the same glowing chip, the style stops signaling anything at all. Distinctiveness is a survival trait, and a trend that erases it costs more than it pays.
We now treat that palette as a warning label in our own work. Our site's signature gradient deliberately bends from off-white through blue and lands on teal, specifically because blue into violet had become the single most recognizable AI signature on the web.
What actually stuck
Strip away the costumes and the survivors are unglamorous.
- Performance became a feature. Core Web Vitals turned speed into a ranking factor, and users stopped forgiving slow pages.
- Accessibility went from checkbox to expectation: honored reduced-motion preferences, real contrast ratios, keyboard paths that work.
- Dense but digestible content won. Bento grids, accordions, and clear hierarchy replaced both walls of text and empty minimalism.
- Real photography outlasted illustration. The flat cartoon-people style faded because it could not say anything true about a specific business.
- Dark interfaces matured from an inverted afterthought into a designed-first language.
The bento grid deserves a special word, because it is the rare trend that survived by being useful. A grid with one dominant tile and smaller supporting tiles gives a page hierarchy you can read in three seconds: the big thing matters most, the rest supports it. That is not fashion, that is information architecture wearing good clothes, and it is why we still reach for it constantly.
Notice the pattern. Everything that died served the maker: it demonstrated skill, filled a showreel, followed a fashion. Everything that stuck serves the visitor: faster pages, readable text, content you can scan, images that show the actual work.
That is the whole lesson of the cycle, and it is the test we apply to whatever trend arrives next. Not is it impressive, but who is it for. If the honest answer is the maker, it is already dying.
